Plan for success

Here's the secret and key to your success. Focus. Focus on your goals and plans. Plan your work and work your plan. Sorry, it's not very glorious or mind blowing, but it works. If you are like most SOHO (Small Office, Home Office) owners you are the Chairman/Chairwoman, CEO, president, vice president, marketing manager, accountant, secretary and janitor. You are responsible for planning, developing, marketing, publishing, delivering, cleaning, organizing - in short, you are the chief cook and bottle washer. So your focus is critical to your success. Has this ever happened to you? You plan to go out on the web and gather some information. While you are out in cyberspace, you notice an ad for something that is not related to what you are looking for. Since it looks really interesting, you click on the ad anyway. By the time you are done clicking from one interesting ad to the next, you have lost two hours. Now you still have to go out and look for your original material. It's happened to all of us. The key is to stay focused on your planned task. Here's one way to stay focused and organized while you are out on the www. First you need to set up a filing system in your web browser's 'favorites' folder. My favorites folder has a list of each of the websites that I am working with and in each of those folders are sub-folders. The sub- folders are labelled administration, marketing, sales, and misc. And here's the little trick that goes along with the folders. Let's say you want to go out and browse through your competition's ezine advertising prices to see how they compare to yours. You go to an ezine directory to find ezines with comparable numbers of subscribers. Suddenly your attention is drawn to a flashing banner that says ADVERTISE FOR FREE - CLICK HERE. Of course you are interested in advertising for free! But instead of getting involved in that right now, click on the banner to pull up the webpage that it is linked to. When you get there, right click your mouse, go to the 'save in favorites' field and put it into the appropriate sub-folder - administration, marketing, sales, or misc. Later when you have some free time, or have planned to search for new ways to promote your site, you can go to the 'marketing' sub-folder and take a look at how to get some of that free advertising that the banner was so excited to tell you about. This is one simple way that you can add extra hours to your day. When you stay focused, you get more accomplished in a shorter period of time and achieve your goals much faster. Your success is directly related to your ability to focus and stay focused on your plan. It may take time to train yourself, but it is worth it. I wish you all the success and happiness that you desire.